Disaster Relief/Emergency Shelter
Dome Building Party: July 18, 1998

...And so they built a cardboard house...

(Well, not cardboard, in this case, but it could be done just as
easily, and at much less expense, using cardboard instead of
plastic...)

The following are pictures from a dome-building party held at my house
in the Santa Cruz Mountains of California. Various friends and members
of the domesteading list came
together on a very hot summer day to build a prototype of a
disaster-relief shelter out of a corrugated plastic material called
"Corrulite".

This has been a long-running topic of discussion on domesteading, and
a pet project of mine since about 1991, when we were designing similar
emergency shelter domes out of cardboard material in college. However,
one of the perennial questions I got from people as they wrestled with
the concept of a cardboard shelter was "But won't cardboard melt in
the rain?" No matter what I said about coating them with wax or
plastic, or even pointing out that milk cartons held liquids
for weeks on end could seem to dispel this gut feeling in people. So
I decided to just go with plastic for this version...and do you know
what? I never heard one person that day talk about it melting in the
rain. :-) In fact, just as I'd hoped, people got on to the more
interesting and advanced design questions such as:

"How are we going to seal the seams so it doesn't leak?"
"How should we make the door and windows?"
"What sort of floor should it have?"
"How can we deliver these?"

On the topic of delivery, I'd always just thought about attaching
small parachutes to a shelter-package and throwing them out the back
of airplanes over disaster areas. However, one very interesting
suggestion came out of a friend at this party. He noted that you'd end
up with probably thousands (or tens of thousands!) of parachutes that
would have only been used once and would be all over the landing
site. While I'm sure uses might spring up for them, this would be an
expensive one-time usage, and if we were to try and collect them all
for re-use, that could also be quite expensive and difficult. The
suggestion they made, which I really like, was to integrate a delivery
mechanism into the packaging design. Specifically, he suggested using
the same Corrulite (or cardboard, depending on which material we used)
material to build a package around the dome panels, and a "wing" of
sorts that extended out from the package. In essence, it would look
and work like a maple tree seed-pod, and would twirl around like a
helicopter as it descended to the ground. I thought this was a
brilliant idea, and hope to implement it in a future delivery package
design.

The US Corrulite Corporation that I bought the material from has since
been bought up by a competitor named Diversi-Plast. There are also
numerous other vendors of corrugated plastic material. It's pretty
much like corrugated cardboard, except made of HDPE ("Type 2")
recyclable plastic. The same stuff you'll find in milk bottles. (You
may have also seen it as the plastic tote bins that the US Post Office uses for sorting &
carrying mail.)

It comes in a variety of weights and styles, allowing for different rigidity
requirements, and in about 30 different stock colors, or they can
custom-match colors as needed. All-in-all, it's a very neat material
and I've found numerous other uses for it throughout the years. I
recommend it highly.

For the disaster relief shelter, we used the 160#/MSF weight material (that's
160 lbs. per 1000 sq. ft.) in the double-faced laminated style. It
was rigid enough for our needs, although it also comes in weights up
to 500#/MSF, which is incredibly rigid. (You'd have a tough time
bending it with bare hands.) I bought sheets in 5 bright colors, and
the translucent "natural" color, which is like a milk jug or some
juice containers.
I suspect that in a disaster zone, even if we shipped single-colored
kits, that people would begin to swap parts around and make
distinctive patterns in their shelters, and they'd probably end up
looking somewhat like the one you see here. And the bright colors would
certainly add a bit of cheer to an otherwise somber situation.

This model was about 12' (3.65m) in diameter, and about 5' (1.52m)
high in the center. It had a covered floor area of approximately 113
ft2 (10.5 m2). It was actually a 1/2 or 1/3
scale model of the shelters I envision for eventual deployment, sized
to house a family and their possessions. (24 or 36 feet in
diameter.)

As a proof of concept, I think this did wonderfully. Many people had
heard me talking about emergency shelters and cardboard houses for
years, but I'm not sure how many of them actually believed it was
possible, and how many were just humoring me. :-) After this day,
everyone knew it was possible.

It's still possible, and long overdue. There are disasters hitting
people somewhere on the planet roughly every 6 hours, by my
calculations and observations over the past decade or so.

This shelter design, while not palatial, is intended to be
mass-producible, air-droppable, easy to assemble with no prior
experience (the instructions would be pictorial to avoid
language/education barriers) and most of all, inexpensive. (The model
you see here was created with US$70.00 worth of Corrulite material,
and there were lots of scraps left over. In fact, the binder clips
used to hold it together cost more than the dome material itself! :-)
If made of cardboard, I predict costs would drop by about a further
factor of ten, based on raw material costs.)

If you'd like to help sculpt this idea into reality for the millions
of disaster victims each year, or the 400,000,000 homeless people
currently on the planet, please read the Contributions and Support page to find out how you can help.

(All of the following pictures should be clickable if you want a
closer look.)

Materials and Tools

The shelter consists of 2 different sized triangular panels, and
is designed to be produced in high volume using traditional cardboard
box-cutting presses and machinery. (Since we were doing this all by
hand, I invited 25 or 30 of my friends to help and we made quick work
of it. :-) )

Malcolm Rieke (in the hat) does a lot of woodworking, and devised an
ingenious crimping device that gave us the mechanical leverage to put
a crease along each edge and allowed us to fold the tabbed edges which
became the integrated reinforcing beams of the dome.

Joe Moore is standing at the crimper.

Bob Cain (left) and Kurth Reynolds (right) operate the crimping press
to fold a panel. Malcolm Rieke (in the hat, and again looking the
other way :-) ) watches his invention in action. Marc Majcher (far
left) looks on.

In the foreground are a few panels clipped together. We used large
binder clips for the temporary construction (I bought a case of them
from Staples and still have about 300 of them around the house. :-) In
production, though, we would very likely use the large brass staples
you sometimes see on cardboard boxes.

Putting it all together

Eric Messick displays a completed pentagon. Not only are they colorful,
but also incredibly light. (The entire dome in these pictures weight
approximately 32 pounds. A 24 foot version would weigh approximately
129 pounds, and a 36 foot version would weigh approximately 290
pounds, if made from the same 160#/MSF material.)

Joe Moore and Eric Messick show how hex and pent panels connect.

We begin the larger assembly of the pents and hexes into a
dome. Pictured from left to right are Bernadette Buck, Joe Moore,
Kurth Reynolds, and Patrick Salsbury.

Starting to take shape...

An inside view. Pictured from left to right are Lyle Scheer, Mike
Crowley, and Jeremy Horsfall.

Lyle Scheer looks on at our completed product!

Creative Costuming

Since this was a party, people got creative with the scraps
and devised an impromptu Corrulite fashion show...

The funny thing is, not only do I have piles of Corrulite scraps
sitting around years later, but I've seen some of these hats &
such still lurking around at my friends houses! :-)

Domeheads

At the end of the day, we took turns poking our head out the top of
the dome, where we'd left a roof vent. (It was seriously hot
that day! The dome quickly heated up to sauna-like temperatures.) This
is an area where something like an opaque cardboard (preferably with a
white coating) might outperform the plastic material by blocking some
of the heat from the sun.

Pictured from left to right are Eric Messick, Joe Moore, and Patrick
Salsbury.

(Descriptive text and self-references such as "I" by Patrick Salsbury)